Even if we assume the numbers in the paper are correct, saving 57 children in a single year is a lot. I have a hard time weighing this against the minor inconvenience caused by the laws to require car seats.
If it's OK to hold your child in the backseat of a taxi to the airport, why shouldn't it be OK to hold your child in the backseat of your friends' car on the way to the airport?
My guess would be that it's a question of numbers. You want 99% of kids to be in child seats, and can allow a few exceptions (since e.g. nobody does a commute to daycare in a taxi). But if you allowed private drivers to avoid car seats in limited circumstances, people would abuse that privilege and never use a car seat, turning that number down to 70% or lower
But when it comes to driving it doesn't really matter much because half the accidents involving two cars are someone else's fault.
We need to look out for each other. Nobody is perfect, but the better each individual does the better the whole is.
I asked out of genuine curiosity, so I hope I didn’t seem standoffish.
this is simular to how the risk of contracting covid varies across different exposure scenarios. i'm hoping the pandemic will get us more used to thinking of risk on a continuum -- which may result in more sane policies around risk management.
It seems like the brainwashing that's been going on to convince people that they can't like policies, they have to be either political party A or party B has forced some notion of absolute bivalency in all matters -- everything is treated by a large proportion of the population as either 100% right or 100% wrong, subtlety seems to be entirely anathema.
"Can a viral spore get out of a mask? 'Yes', so noone should wear masks, they're an evil plot!" seems to be such a prevalent line of 'thinking'.
https://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/doyle-levitt%...
And here’s a pretty entertaining TED talk he gave:
I recall when I was young (before car seat laws), the car had shorter seat belts in the back. Almost as though they expected children to sit there . . .
We would generally bring the car seat onto the airline and have the child sit in the seat on the flight. It prevented some of the chaos of wanting to run around the airplane. “This is transport; just like in the car or other airplanes, you have to be in your seat.”
Needs a window seat (obvs) and the red sticker “approved for aviation use” (which the cabin crew did check every single time, which was impressive). Ask for a seatbelt extension and adjust the belt so the buckling is done on the side rather than smack in the middle of the seat.
Yes, but I think this figure was proposed in order to be contrasted with the reduction of 8,000 births that same year.
We can argue if the lives saved by seats are enough to counterbalance the inconveniences they pose, but among this inconveniences I would not put the reduction in the number of third children - I would actually put that as a plus, as a super-soft demographic control policy.
It is not a plus, because in the US there is no need to control births. To the contrary, there are not enough births.
I think the US is about even, or slightly positive. But then the US has a lot less people than Europe on a per land area measure.